


Private Eye (The Steps You Take Remix)

by summerstorm



Category: Community
Genre: Gen, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-06
Updated: 2011-04-06
Packaged: 2017-10-17 16:49:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/178941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/summerstorm/pseuds/summerstorm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>or,</p><p>Five Jobs Britta Had Before She Became a Private Detective (And One She Had After That).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Private Eye (The Steps You Take Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Winger and Perry, Private Eyes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/110603) by [myrifique](https://archiveofourown.org/users/myrifique/pseuds/myrifique). 



1.

Britta's parents buy her a car—a new one, cheap and small but new, not secondhand and run-down—for her high school graduation. She doesn't really deserve it, not for _graduating_ ; it's a mystery to her why she's been accepted to any colleges at all considering the state of her GPA and the way her list of extracurriculars dries out halfway through her sophomore year of high school. Plus it's not like she couldn't have done better. Tried harder. There was really no way she could have tried _less_ hard; maybe that's worthy of a reward.

The thing is, Britta likes her car, and she's going to college in the fall, and maybe she doesn't like that as much as the car, but she can accept it. It's not conformism if it's good for her, right? She doesn't even have to declare her major right away. And people are supposed to be, like, smart and passionate about things in college. She's sure she'll still be surrounded by careless bigots, but she's looking forward to being surrounded by less of them than usual. That's one thing college has going for it.

There's still three months until that, though, so Britta gets a job for the summer, selling tickets at the local movie theater, just like she did last summer, and the summer before that. The only thing that's new this year is her best friend gets a job there as well, so her breaks don't involve fending off random strangers who want to know when her break is ending and reminding her boss that she's not legal and, if he keeps leaning in and using his pathetic excuse for a bedroom voice on her, she's going to file a harassment complaint. Now her breaks consist of smoking up in the alley behind the building, the one that edges into the parking lot, and trying to ignore the stink of butter on Paige's clothes while they share a pair of earphones plugged into a walkman—usually Paige's, because, not unlike when it comes to smelling like popcorn, Paige has no qualms about buying new music every week.

Around the middle of July, the theater decides to run a midnight film noir cycle, keeping Britta working until half an hour into the last showing, which is fine, whatever, it's not like she has school in the morning. She usually gets to leave her post five minutes after midnight anyway because people don't know how to appreciate good cinema, and there's no one around to say she's gone. So, every night, she gathers her things and sets up camp by the refreshments fridge while Paige finishes up.

One of those nights, Britta brings in a pair of loudspeakers and hooks them in, blasting Radiohead through the deserted foyer. It's pretty awesome, dancing around the hardwood floors, letting herself be carried by the music. Britta's kind of mesmerized by the time she drops into one of the stools by the register.

"God," she says, "I wish I could see them live."

"You know, they're playing a couple towns over in a few weeks," Paige says. "We should go."

"Yeah," Britta says, feeling dazed. "Yeah, we totally should."

So they do, and they stay for the show the day after, and they meet these guys who have bought this awesome hippie van and are planning to follow the band for the rest of their tour, all the way around the country. It's a cool group of people: there's this girl Haley who just graduated college, and a couple of dropouts, and this guy just out of high school who's taking a sabbatical year before going to Princeton— _Princeton_ ; if Britta cared about things like that, she'd definitely be impressed.

Okay, maybe Britta cares about things like that, because it isn't until he says he's planning to go into pre-med that she starts considering joining them. Seriously. Because—it can't be that bad, right? If someone who has plans that big can squeeze a few free months in before them, put them off for a while? Britta doesn't even know what she wants to do yet. She could use the time to find out.

Paige seems just as enamored with the idea as Britta is—or maybe just as enamored with one of the guys who dropped out of college as Britta is enamored with the touring idea, but to Britta it seems like the same thing.

"He said we should join them," she tells Britta, grinning more widely than Britta's ever seen her grin before, which isn't really that much. The idea of Paige grinning like a normal person is the stuff nightmares are made of. It's just not right. "We should totally join them," Paige adds, and Britta lets herself bounce a little in the diner booth before coming back to earth.

"No," Britta says, shaking her head. "No way my parents are going to finance that one. I can't afford it."

Paige bites her lip and they sit there in silence for a while, wallowing in self-pity. Then, Paige gasps and says, "Yes you can."

They sell Britta's car the next morning, and move into a dirty van.

It's a great summer, except for the lack of money, and the repetitive food, and the improvable hygiene. But that's all things Britta always thought she'd be encountering in college anyway, so it's preparation for that, kind of.

Late in August, the list of setbacks to touring the country following Radiohead is engrossed by Paige, Paige and her moods and the fights she keeps picking with Britta, like this wasn't Paige's idea in the first place.

Paige leaves a week and a half into September, talking about how she can't afford to lose a semester and this was fun while it lasted but it's time to go back to real life. Britta's outraged; she thought _this_ was their real life, hitting the road, meeting new people, learning by experience instead of sitting in a classroom and being told how they're supposed to feel.

Paige gives her a sad look and Britta thinks she's gotten through to her until Paige says, "I want to hit a road that leads _somewhere_ ," cryptic and haughty like Britta's the pathetic one in this situation.

"Fine," Britta says, "whatever. See if I care."

 

2.

Britta takes the whole semester off, picking up small jobs here and there to pay for gas and food and the occasional motel room. In December, the van stops in Haley's hometown, a week off during which Britta sleeps on a tiny futon and takes more showers than she has in the past month combined. On a walk around town, she finds herself picking up a city map and staring at the word on the cover square: it's a name she's seen before, on her college applications, on the acceptance letter she agreed to say yes to.

Haley agrees to let her crash at her place until Britta gets back on her feet, and Britta honors her promise: she signs on to the first job that takes her, because she needs the money and she doesn't want to live off Haley, who's drowning in student loans and can barely make rent as it is, and her unsuspecting roommates, who barely even know Britta.

It's just waitressing at a diner. She's not the best at it and sometimes people walk out on her when she helpfully points out how bad red meat is for them or what the poor animal they're about to ingest went through so they could have a nice lunch, but she's fine, and none of those things must get back to her manager, because she gets to quit on her own terms—just before the summer, having decided to spend it home after a string of long, long conversations slash yelling matches with her mom over the phone—before she's fired.

But it's a job, and she gets her own shitty apartment with her own not that shitty roommates, and when she goes back to it in the fall, it feels like _coming_ back.

She has a life she kind of fits into, and she doesn't want to call Paige and yell at her for leaving anymore.

 

3.

Being an assistant is a living hell. Britta would trade it for her old job at the movie theater in a heartbeat. Hell, she'd trade it for _Paige_ 's old job. Anything to stop being ordered around and carrying coffee back and forth until it's not too hot or too cold or too sweet or too sour, carrying copies back and forth until they're perfectly centered and no ink has run and there are no shadows under the titles, carrying notes back and forth until they mean something to their recipient, like it's Britta's fault the coffee place across the street hires people without making sure they can work the sugar in spoonfuls and the copy machine is an old piece of crap and sometimes people call and don't leave enough information. Britta doesn't _have_ enough information herself to know how much information from a caller or another will be satisfactory, because most of it is supposedly confidential.

Britta likes the pay, and the fact that when she goes home she doesn't have to rub herself raw in the shower to get the smell of burgers out of her skin, and how everyone around her is dressed impeccably but doesn't look at her wrong for occasionally coming in wearing a leather jacket. And it's definitely good for her resume, working at a law firm.

She spends two years there, fluctuating between loving it—the steady hours, the defined responsibilities, the junior associate she's assigned to work for six months into the job—and hating it—the contempt, the in-office dress code, the accountant she works for during her first six months.

Her class schedule starts looking like she's shooting for law school, credits piling up and up until she realizes with a start, one gloomy, foggy day in February, as she's running a virus scan through her boss's boss's computer, that she wants to major in Computer Science instead.

 

4.

It's pretty much a shock to Britta that she gets to transfer schools _and_ jobs the following semester; she chooses to move because the school she's attending doesn't have a great program for her now she knows what kind of program she wants, but she's kind of surprised when she's accepted into the new school she picks out. She gets to keep working thanks to some networking and two letters of recommendation. Britta doesn't manage to conceal her surprise when, after her junior associate—not _hers_ , but, yes, kind of hers—hands her one, she gets another one from Mr. Duncan, like he wasn't an asshole to her the entire time she worked for him.

Still, her new job is tech support and it allows her to practice her old skills as she learns new ones, and dress however she wants, even under her leather jackets.

One day, she's called into a name partner's office and offered a position as an investigator. In-house, just for them, with all the issues that brings: new non-disclosure agreements, deliberately doing things she may not agree with, her new schedule becoming a constant string of those days she gets called in at midnight to fix a bug or find a phone number or unearth old, badly erased sound under recordings.

The pay is also much better, though, and she's not subordinate to any specific person beyond whichever case she's working for, and it almost looks like the beginning of a career, two months before she's set to graduate from college.

Britta waits those two months, and says yes with a copy of her diploma folded into her pocket, for good luck.

 

5.

So Britta's an investigator. She is _not_ a hacker or anything fishy and unsavory like that. Or illegal. Her job is perfectly legal. She asks for information. Nicely. Sometimes she borrows it, but it's for the good of the case. The good of the world. Knowing the truth matters, and Britta gets to help out with that. Like, okay, sometimes the truth is sort of buried by the firm so they can build a better case for their clients, but it usually comes out anyway. Somehow.

Sometimes, when she spends time in court, she kind of wishes she could be a lawyer. She knows the law like the palm of her hand, and she wonders if she'd be good, if she should have kept at it, if she should have shot for getting a position as a lawyer instead of inning for tech support.

These thoughts meet their demise when the lawyer working one of her cases falls off a ladder and ends up in the hospital for two weeks. Everyone else in the firm is booked up, so, for a few days, Britta sits in as second chair and gets to put a word or two in during negotiations.

She manages, somehow, she doesn't even know how, to scare off a witness, a witness she kind of needed, and watches the settlement get worse and worse for her case right before her eyes.

The thing is, she tries to be logical, because she firmly believes logic is the key to a better world, and it's possible she doesn't always put the brakes on quickly enough when logic leads her down the wrong path. It's not her fault, not entirely; there's new evidence against her firm's client and less and less they can do. But it's definitely not an experience she wants to repeat.

Investigating goes well, though. She always knows what she needs to find, even when she's not explicitly told, and she doesn't have to argue for it; she just looks for things, interviews people, occasionally breaks into places. No manipulation required. No that much effort in the way of people skills, either, though Britta learns to rein in her judgmental faces quickly enough. They don't come into play that much, anyway; it's not like they sue big corporations often, and it's not a great affront to pretend she doesn't care about anybody else's sordid business even as she's coaxing details out of their mouths, or their phone bill, or their credit card statements.

It's really not a great affront. She works for corporate lawyers; that's just how things work. She's not—she didn't expect anything else. She knows she's not the only one who has to put her beliefs aside every now and then to get a good cut.

And it's not her job to choose her cases, so she's not responsible for how they turn out, on a moral compass.

Seriously. She _isn't_.

She doesn't know when she starts putting her job in jeopardy. All she knows is one day she's planting a bug in the office of some real estate big fish and the next she's standing outside a court room, slipping a CD into a prosecutor's bag, thinking about how Rich is going to kill her.

Rich doesn't deserve this, but their client doesn't deserve to win this case. Thievery, fraud, even mild violence—Britta can handle seeing that kind of felony unpunished, but this? This is not okay, and her firm has proof the prosecution doesn't to put this guy in jail for the rest of his life, locked away where he won't even _see_ a young girl, let alone talk to her, or touch her, or stick her body in a fridge in a storage facility under a fake name that doesn't even trace back to him.

That the prosecution can't manage to trace back to him.

But Britta can, and sitting in, watching the trial go the way of releasing him, watching frustration heat up the prosecutor's face—she can't do it.

She can't do it, she can't hide the evidence, and she can't stop thinking about how she definitely can, how she's done it before: walked out, found a bar, drowned her principles in strong whiskey and scrawling her phone number on a cop's hand. Britta likes cops. It's not like a schoolgirl fantasy thing—ugh, gross—but this weird attraction to maybe following the letter of the law—not even the real law, just that general some things are good, some things are bad law—in some aspect of her life. So sometimes it's literally following someone who metaphorically follows the letter of the law; it's good enough for her, after cases like this.

It isn't this time. She doesn't know what's different; all she knows is the trial lasts two weeks and every day she puts her job in jeopardy. On Tuesday, she shares information she shouldn't. On Wednesday, she makes a call she shouldn't. On Friday, she withholds evidence that would help Rich's case and get her a nice bonus at the end of it.

On Saturday, she makes another call, and finds herself having dinner in a private booth at a fancy restaurant, far enough from her firm that she knows she won't be seen, close enough to court to be obvious. Obvious means harmless sometimes, though: hiding in plain sight. It's not like she couldn't possibly want to go out to dinner with this—Miss Edison woman.

Britta doesn't know why someone that young is headlining a case this big, unless the state's attorney is banking on the jury relating the defendant's victims to her. She looks the part: cute, colorful, naïve. The idea of it is pretty damned unsavory, but hell, Britta's having dinner with her to basically hand over her firm's case. She understands drastic measures.

It's worth it, in the end; the defendant is sentenced to life in prison despite Rich's extremely convincing closing arguments, and Annie—because calling her Miss Edison makes Britta feel dirty, like their relationship is exactly what it is—smiles at her and Britta honestly thinks she's gotten away with it.

It doesn't happen again.

It doesn't happen again because, the following Thursday, she gets laid off.

She doesn't even get fired for ignoring the interests of her firm.

She's on the last day of the week she decided to allow herself to wallow before looking for a new job—she deserves it; it's random and cruel that her job was a casualty of layoffs when she risked it like that, but it also means she was so good no one suspected her—when she gets a call from Annie. Britta's not in the mood for sympathy, so she lets it go to voicemail. She can almost hear the apologetic shrug in, "I'm sorry about your job," and the determination on Annie's face as she says, "If it helps at all, you did the right thing. You should feel proud."

Britta's about to wander off to the kitchen to refill her snack bowl when Annie adds, "Actually, if it helps more—and it does, I think it will—I was wondering if—if you're still looking for a new job, if you'd maybe like to go freelance? A friend of mine from law school set up this detective agency—totally legit, don't worry—and he's kind of swamped and has been talking about getting a—a 'second in command.'" Britta can see the scrunch of her nose around those words, the same one she got every time a witness said something less than ideal for her case.

Britta doesn't pick up the phone right away, because she's not _desperate_. She waits for Annie to hang up, and she waits for the episode she's watching to be over, and she stares at the phone the whole time, wondering why she shouldn't be enthusiastic about a new job—one where she can maybe pick her cases, or at least drop any she really, really doesn't want to work. One where she's her own boss; if it's just Annie's friend working with her, well, Britta could get her name up on the door at some point in the near future. She's grown out of accepting favors, but this doesn't feel like one: Britta's good at her job. She has the skills, and the experience.

It's 10PM when she calls Annie back; 9AM when she walks into Abed Nadir's offices on Monday; and 11:30AM when she signs her new contract.

Britta Perry, private investigator. She likes the sound of that.

 

+1.

Working for the CIA is a lot like her old job as a private detective. She still plants bugs and hacks into security systems and disables and enables alarms and occasionally badges her way into places, if she can't get herself in by lying or by having someone else lie for her. Lying feels more normal than flaunting her badge, for some reason. Jeff—Agent Winger, when on a job—is better at that than her, has some kind of innate ability to deceive people and be a smarmy smart-ass while doing it, but their personal... connection, as it were, isn't a secret, and their responsibilities outside headquarters don't overlap that much, so she doesn't get him as backup very often. That's probably why their relationship survives and survives past the two months Annie gave them when Britta told her she was leaving the Nadir-Perry agency to pursue detection under diplomatic immunity, of sorts.

She usually partners up with Agent Barnes, who's good with people the way Jeff is not: sincerely. She's aware that he knows Abed and Annie because she mentions them when she's bored on a stakeout and he tells her so, but she doesn't know just how well he knows them until, a few weeks after Britta changes jobs, she rings Annie and Abed's doorbell only to be greeted by Agent Barnes holding a baby. A baby that is not his. A baby that is definitely, definitely Annie's. It's old enough for Britta to recognize it, even if she can't _quite_ tell its gender. It's not her fault Annie had boy-and-girl twins.

Beyond the new partner and her general immunity to being seized by other law enforcement officials, things are not that different. She's CIA now. She doesn't need warrants, she doesn't get arrested, she doesn't have to worry about being wrestled to the floor with nothing to defend herself with but her own hands and a taser. She has access to a shooting range now, and any time now—any time now, and Winger's free to shut up about the completely reasonable number of times she's failed it—she's going to pass the psychological test necessary to be allowed to carry a gun, and get a really cool one, and stop feeling like she's going to get killed every time she slips out of a private home or an office building and reconnects the security system.

Things are still sometimes too gray for her liking, or outright go awry, and Britta still handles it with Scotch on a pretty regular basis, but at least she doesn't pick up cops and forget to call them back anymore. Sometimes she wonders if her... whatever with Winger is really an improvement on that part of her old life, but most of the time—well.

Most of the time, she thinks she's done all right.


End file.
